#title Is Post-Structuralist Political Theory Anarchist?
#author Todd May
#LISTtitle Is post-structuralist political theory anarchist?
#SORTauthors Todd May
#SORTtopics post-anarchism, post-structuralist, anti-humanism, critical theory, academy
#date 1989
#lang en
#source Philosophy and Social Criticism 15 (2):167–182 (1989).
#notes This text would later become the foundation for May’s book, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism.
#pubdate 2019-09-26T00:15:28
I would like to say something about the function of any diagnosis
concerning the nature of the present....Any description must
always be made in accordance with these kinds of virtual fracture
which open up the space of freedom understood as a space of
concrete freedom, i.e. of possible transformation.
**— Michel Foucault**[1]
...obviously a whole series of partial and incomplete victories, of
concessions won from the holders of power, will not lead to an
anarchist society. But it will widen the scope of free action and the
potentiality for freedom in the society we have.
**— Colin Ward**[2]
The difficulty in evaluating the political philosophy of the French
post-structuralists — Foucault, Deleuze, and Lyotard in
particular — is inseparable from the difficulty in understanding
what their general political philosophy is. That they have rejected
Marxism as an adequate account of our social and political
situation is clear. But what they have substituted for it is still a
subject of contention. This is because, rather than offering a
general political theory, the post-structuralists have instead given
us specific analyses of concrete situations of oppression. From
Foucault’s *Histoire de la Folie* to Lyotard’s *The Differend*, the
focus has been upon madness, sexuality, psychoanalysis,
language, the unconscious, art, etc., but not upon a unified
account of what
politics is or how it should be conducted in the
contemporary world.
This absence or refusal of a general political theory has led some
critics to accuse the post-structuralists of a self-defeating
normative relativism or outright nihilism.[3] The question these
critics raise is this: if the post-structuralists cannot offer a general
political theory which includes both a principle for political
evaluation and a set of values which provide the foundation for
critique, don’t their theories lapse into an arbitrary decision, or
worse, mere chaos? The assumption behind this question is that
in order to engage in political philosophy adequately, one must
first possess a set of values which are either generally accepted
or can be defended by recourse to generally accepted values.
Then, one must construct one’s political philosophy using those
values as foundations. Last, one should compare the present
political situation with the constructed one in order to help
understand the deficiencies of the present and possible routes to
remedy those deficiencies.[4]
The challenge to post-structuralism is to offer an account of itself
as a theoretical political practice. It is a challenge that cannot be
answered within the terms of the two traditions that have defined
the space of political theory in the twentieth century: liberalism
and Marxism. Both these traditions have been rejected by the
post-structuralists. However, there is a tradition, though not cited
by the post-structuralists, within which their thought can be
situated and thus better understood and evaluated. That tradition
is the neglected “third way” of political theory: anarchism.
Anarchism is often dismissed in the same terms as post-structuralism for being an ethical relativism or a voluntarist chaos.
However, the theoretical tradition of anarchism, though not as
voluminous as Marxism or liberalism, provides a general
framework within which post-structuralist thought can be
situated, and thus more adequately evaluated. The remainder of
this paper will take up the task of understanding
post-structuralism as a contemporary form of anarchism. First, the
traditional anarchist position will be discussed. Second, the
post-structuralist critique of certain nineteenth century concepts
underlying the anarchist narrative will be brought to bear. Third,
an anarchism free from these concepts and more consonant with
contemporary French political thought — a post-structuralist
anarchism — will be sketched. In this sketch, it will be shown how
such an anarchism avoids the problems that vitiate what might be
called “foundationalis” political theorizing of the type described
above.
----
In the conflict between Marx and Bakunin that defined the First
International, at issue were both the method and goals of
organizing the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.[5] In Marx’s
view, it was necessary that there be a centralized leadership
coordinating the struggle. Further, the goal of the struggle would
be proletarian state ownership of the means of production. All this
was incompatible, in Bakunin’s eyes, with the aims of the workers
and would lead unavoidably to a new repressive political
structure. “Since there is to be political power there will inevitably
be subjects, got up as citizens, true, in proper republican style, but
subjects all the same, and as such compelled to obey, for without
obedience no power is possible.” [6] What Bakunin found onerous
in Marx’s politics, both in its strategy and its goal, was the idea of
representation as a political concept. Where there is
representation, there is oppression. Anarchism can be defined as
the struggle against representation in public life.
Representation, as a political concept, is the handing over of
power by a group of people to another person or group of people
ostensibly in order to have the interests of the former realized.
Political representation differs from administrative
representation, which involves no fundamental transfer of power
but instead merely a delegation of administrative capability. In
administrative representation, a group empowers an individual or
another group to enact specific programs or specific means to a
general goal; the representing group can be withdrawn or recalled
at any time, and all final decisions lie with the represented group.
By contrast, political representation involves a transfer of
decision-making power from the represented to the representer.[7]
The representing individual or group acts in the name of, and thus
with the legitimation of, the represented group; its decisions
cannot be overturned by the represented group.
Anarchist thought distrusts political representation because it
sees the cession of power as the invitation to abuse. In this sense,
it is not only state or economic power which is the object of its
mistrust, but all forms of power exercised by one group over
another. Within the anarchist tradition, the concept of politics and
the political field is wider than it is within either Marxism or
liberalism. For Bakunin, the two fundamental power
arrangements to be struggled against (along with the capitalists)
were, as his major work indicates, the state and the church.[8] To
these, later anarchists have added plant managers, patriarchy
and the institution of marriage, prisons, psychotherapy, and a
myriad of other oppressions.[9] Thus, in all areas of an individual’s
social life, anarchism promotes direct consensual
decision-making rather than a delegation of authority.
Direct decision-making along the various registers of one’s social
life leads to a more decentralized approach to political intervention than Marxism would allow. For the latter, although a
variety of social ills may not, strictly speaking, be reducible to
capitalist economic structure, it is capitalism that founds their
possibility. In the end there is only one intervention that matters:
the intervention to reappropriate surplus value through the
seizure of the means of production and the capture of the state.
Marxism, no matter how supportive of struggles against racism,
sexism, etc. it has been, has always seen them as strategically
subordinated to the struggle for economic socialism. That is why
it lends itself to centralized forms of struggle and political
representation, in short Leninism, as its strategic expression. As
anarchists have pointed out, however, and as history has made
evident, such means are not to be divorced from their ends. The
dictatorship of the proletariat has turned out to be, above all, a
dictatorship. “It has thus become obvious that a further advance
in social life does not lie in the direction of a further concentration
of power and regulative functions in the hands of a governing
body, but in the direction of decentralization, both territorial and
functional.” [10] Both territorial *and* functional. Both in strategy and
as the goal. Real political change comes from below and from
many points, not from above and from a center. “The anarchist
alternative is that of fragmentation, fission rather than fusion,
diversity rather than unity, a mass of societies rather than a mass
society.” [11]
Anarchism, then, focuses upon the oppressed themselves rather
than upon those who claim to speak for them. And it sees
oppression not merely in one type of situation, but rather in a
variety of irreducible situations. In order to understand
oppression, one must describe the situation in which it is found;
there is no such thing as a class that is *a priori* oppressed across
all situations. Here anarchism exhibits a resistance not only to
reducibility but to abstraction more generally. “By proclaiming our
morality of equality, or anarchism, we refuse to assume a right
which moralists have always taken upon themselves to claim, that
of mutilating the individual in the name of some ideal.”[12] What
anarchism resists are the many ways in which the individual
becomes subordinated to something outside him or herself.
Representation by a group or another individual is one form of that
subordination. Representation of one’s humanity by means of an
ideal is another. Whether it be “the good,” “the march of history,”
or “the needs of society,” anarchism is suspicious of ideals that
function to coerce individuals into subordinating themselves to a
larger cause.
This does not mean, however, that anarchism is either
individualist in the liberal sense or morally hedonistic. Liberal
individualism has always claimed to value freedom over enforced
equality, holding the latter to require unnecessary constraints
upon the former. In the anarchist tradition, however, it makes no
sense to talk about freedom without some notion of equality.
“Freedom without equality means that the poor and weak are less
free than the rich and strong, and equality without freedom means
that we are all slaves together.” [13] Freedom is not juridical, it is
material; it is defined not by how one is treated under the law but
by the concrete choices one is capable of making in the situations
in which one finds oneself. Although there is a tradition of
individualist anarchism,[14] its thought runs counter to the anarchist
analyses of concrete oppression occurring within a variety of
concrete contexts. Anarchism is not, fundamentally, liberalism
gone wild.
It is also not a form of amoralism. By refusing to submit to an ideal
of “the good,” anarchism does not reject morality. Instead, it
argues that by holding an ideal to which individuals must
subordinate themselves, one in fact acts counter to the moral
intuition of respect for others. The rejection of a moral ideal is
made precisely on moral grounds. “The good” is merely another
way to represent people to themselves by means of something
external to them. Rather than relying upon their own moral
intuitions and their capacity to reflect upon them in irreducible
concrete situations, individuals are asked to submit to an ideal
which claims to realize their highest nature but in fact disjoins
them from their capacities for critical reflection and thoughtful
action. If individuals are to be able to act morally, they must be
allowed to consider the situations in which they find themselves
in their specificity and materiality, rather than submitting to an
abstract formula which is imposed upon situations from above.
Here lies the *a priori* of traditional anarchism: trust in the
individual. From its inception, anarchism has founded itself on a
faith in the individual to realize his or her decision-making power
morally and effectually.[15] The clearest contemporary statement of
this trust comes from anarchist Murray Bookchin: “The
revolutionary project must take its point of departure from a
fundamental libertarian precept: every normal human being is
competent to manage the affairs of society and, more
specifically, the community in which he or she is a member.” [16] Left
to their own devices, individuals have a natural ability — indeed a
propensity — to devise social arrangements that are both just and
efficient. It is only in situations of inequality, situations in which
some individuals are permitted to have power over others, that
individual capabilities are deformed and become directed toward
oppression rather than mutual respect and creativity. “It is the
characteristic of privilege and every privileged position to kill the
mind and heart of men.”[17]
In this sense, the distinctive feature shared
by all institutions that
oppress — political, economic, religious, patriarchial, or other — is
the repression of individual potential. Although oppression occurs
on a variety of fronts and in a multitude of ways, all of its
variegations share the trait of restricting action, of limiting
individual choice. It is, of course, a parody of anarchism to claim
that it promotes a chaos of hedonism to subvert the monolith of
state power; but it is here, in the complementary notions of
individual competence and oppression as repression, that such
a claim takes root.
----
There are, on the surface, several similarities between traditional
anarchist thought and post-structuralist theory. The critique of
representation is a central theme of the post-structuralists;
Deleuze once told Foucault “you were the first...to teach us
something absolutely fundamental: the indignity of speaking for
others.” [18] Decentralization, local action, discovering power in its
various networks rather than in the state alone, are hallmark traits
of post-structuralist analyses. However, if post-structuralist
political thought were to be characterized by a single feature, it
would be the critique of autonomy involved in the theory of the
subject. Foucault’s histories of the constitution of the subject,
Deleuze and Guattari’s encrustation of the social into the
interstices of the personal, and Lyotard’s analyses of the
pragmatic aspects of language that are determinative forthought
were produced, in part, to denigrate the concept of the subject as
an autonomous, self-transparent, self-sustaining entity. The
*a priori* of traditional anarchism is anathema to post-structuralism.
It would seem, then, that the similarities between anarchism and
post-structuralism end at the surface. For what would anarchism
be without individual autonomy? It is autonomy that founds the
possibility of action from below, that resists the reduction to
representation, and that constitutes the moral dignity that
abstraction and representation offend. Without a trust in the
individual it makes no sense to accuse institutional powers of
repressing the individual; without a subject recognizably distinct
from the social sphere, it makes no sense to talk of autonomy at
all. Traditional anarchism is founded on the conception of the
individual as possessing a reserve that is irreducible to social
arrangements of power; to remove it, or to dilute it in a network of
social practices, effectively precludes the possibility of
resistance.
Yet it is precisely the denial of a reserve within subjectivity forming
the locus of resistance that the post-structuralists assert.
Foucault and Lyotard are clear on this. Foucault: “All my analyses
are against the idea of universal necessities in human
existence.” [19] Lyotard (in a review of Deleuze and Guattari’s
*Anti-Oedipus*): “Looking for the creditor [the one from whom surplus
value is stolen and who will revolt for its repayment] is wasted
effort, the *subject* of the credit would always have to be *made* to
*exist*, the proletariat to be incarnated on the surface of the
socius.” [20] Deleuze is the closest to traditional anarchism; his
claim that “[t]here is only desire and the social, and nothing
else” [21] appears to lend itself to an interpretation of individual
autonomy opposing social repression. But, for Deleuze, desire is
not autonomy: it is anonymous energy that has revolutionary
potential only because it is an excess over the constraints which,
in connivance with the social, it also *creates and sustains.* “To
the question ‘How can desire desire its own repression, how can
it desire its slavery?’ we reply that the powers which crush desire,
or which subjugate it, themselves already form part of the
assemblages of desire.” [22]
Why does post-structuralist political theory reject the concept of
individual autonomy, which forms the cornerstone of traditional
anarchist theory? Foucault, Deleuze, and Lyotard seek social
change no less than the anarchists. But if they do not rely upon
a reserve within the subject to constitute the wellspring of change,
where will they find it? Certainly not in an external representative
they are unanimous in rejecting. The abandonment of the
autonomous individual or subject as the locus of resistance, and
for it the substitution of “something else,” constitutes the decisive
passage from a concept of resistance rooted in nineteenth
century thought to more current conceptions. It parallels changes
that have occurred in other areas in philosophy, as theorizing
rooted in the subject has given way to the “linguistic turn” and,
more recently, a “social turn.” [23]
The reasons for jettisoning the subject as the locus of resistance
are both historical and conceptual. Historically, the revolution
predicted by Marx has not, in the West at least, come to pass. This
failure is in part due to the fact that the working classes of the
industrially developed nations have not, as Marx thought they
would, become increasingly immiserated. However, part of the
reason for the failure of the revolutionary prediction has also been
ascribed to the ability of capitalism to manipulate subjectivity.[24]
The Frankfurt School, for instance, had sought to explain the
absence of revolution by recourse to the cultural system’s ability
to absorb all resistance, and with it all subjectivity. In the events
of May, 1968 in France, students claimed that contemporary
capitalism created a spectacle in which everyone was
maneuvered into participating. In short, the reserve of individual
autonomy had been absorbed into the systems of oppression,
and thus was unsuited to form the basis for radical change.
The questioning of individual autonomy, however, is more than a
historical matter. Twentieth century philosophy has come to
understand the subject to be suffused by forces once considered
external to it. The structure of knowledge has been found to be
tied to the structure of language and to social and cultural
practices of justification; it is not a given of the species. Behavior
is thought to be more deeply rooted in surrounding milieux
(whether they are societal reinforcements or the unconscious
family theater) than was previously considered. To these
changes post-structuralism has added a critique of humanism
that precludes a return to the subject as the hope of resistance.
The post-structuralist critique of humanism is founded on two
intertwined tenets: first, that the subject as such is constituted in
exteriority, and second, that power does not repress but rather
creates. In Foucault, the critique cuts across both historical and
conceptual dimensions. Particularly in his laterwork, he concerns
himself with the question of how the subject is constituted within
networks of knowledge that are also networks of power (a schism
that Foucault calls “power/knowledge”). *Discipline and Punish*,
“a correlative history of the modern soul and of a new power to
judge,” [25] demonstrates how the discourse of knowledge about the
modern psyche is also a practice of power such that what has
been read as a journey of scientific discovery can as easily be
read as an increasingly subtle display of disciplinary technique. In
this nexus of science and discipline, the subject as such is being
constituted. An autonomy is ascribed to the subject, a realm of
individual character that offers itself to prison wardens,
psychologists, social workers, educators, and others as material
to be shaped into socially acceptable patterns. Subjectivity and
“normalization” become corresponding terms with a relationship
of direct implication; the wholeness of each depends upon
adequacy of the other. The first volumes of Foucault’s
*History of Sexuality* broaden these themes, using as their point of
reference “‘that interplay between truth and sex’ which was
bequeathed to us by the nineteenth century.” [26] His studies offer
historical reasons that are simultaneously political and conceptual for rejecting the view of subjectivity as a proper cite for
situating resistance to the current order.
Deleuze focuses more on the energic than on the historical.[27] Like
the anarchists, and more than Foucault, he is concerned with
finding a space of resistance. But like Foucault, he rejects the
concept of subjectivity, seeing it as constituted rather than
constituting. His analysis of this constitution takes the form, in the
two-volume *Capitalism and Schizophrenia*, of showing how
desire, a productive energic stratum that is “*part of the infrastructure*,” [28] can become self-oppressive in its
appropriation by the social field within which it exists. Under
capitalism, the central mechanism of the oppression of desire is
the constitution of the subject through the Oedipus complex. The
operation of Oedipus is, for Deleuze and Guattari, historical rather
than anthropological; its result, the modern subject, is a
contributor to the social order rather than a form of resistance to
it. To discover the possibility of revolution is to abandon the
subject and to seek alternative routes, which Deleuze calls “lines
of escape,” [29] in which to channel desire. Thus Deleuze’s critique
of humanism parallels Foucault’s, and denies the subject the
dignity of its autonomy through an analysis of the mechanisms by
which it it becomes constituted to be a subject.
During most of the 1970s, Lyotard shared Deleuze’s concern with
energics, objecting only that Oedipus was an irrelevant part of the
analysis and that capitalism had its own energic mechanism of
self-destruction.[30] For him, the subject was not so much
dangerous as negligible; humanism was more irrelevant than
insidious. In more recent works, Lyotard moves away from
energics to a concern with language; the subject, however,
remains unaddressed. What *The Differend* analyzes are the
pragmatics of discourse that enable some discourses to achieve
hegemony while others are reduced to silence. The concern here
is with justice, which in his earlier book, *Just Gaming*, had
emerged as a preoccupation for Lyotard because he was
seeking, in the wake of the demise of metanarratives, the concept
(following Aristotle) of “justice without models.” [31] *The Differend*
studies the political pragmatics of language, and argues that
linguistic discourse always appears in the form of a genre, with its
own rules of style, evidence, and succession. In his most urgent
example, he takes up the denial by Robert Faurisson that the
holocaust ever occurred. Faurisson argues that since no one can
describe the operation of the gas chambers from first-hand
experience, there is no evidence for their having actually
operated or killed anyone. This type of argument Lyotard calls a
“differend,” “the case where the plaintiff is divested of the means
to argue and becomes for that reason a victim.” [32]
For Lyotard, the dominance of certain genres of language creates
victims by denying the expression proper to other genres. The
dominance of the scientific genre is one of those victimizing
genres, whose rules of evidence Faurisson uses (or better,
warps) to deny the claims of Jews upon history. The underlying
argument of Lyotard’s concern with the pragmatics of discourse
is that there must be space created for a proliferation of different
(and even new types of) genres, if the incommensurability that
attaches to different genres is not to result in the victimization of
speakers. In this concern, Lyotard focuses not upon the
autonomy of a subject — a focus which would merely substitute
another dominant genre — but upon discourse itself, the
possibilities and dangers presented by the necessity of events of
spoken discourse. Genres of discourse create worlds; at the
same time, the dominance of some genres threatens to cast the
worlds of some into obscurity, and ultimately into non-existence.
----
The post-structuralist analyses of the knowledge, of desire, and
of language, subvert the humanist discourse which is the
foundation of traditional anarchism. Moreover, they consider
humanism’s emphasis on the autonomy and dignity of the subject
to be dangerous (except for Lyotard, for whom it is mostly
irrelevant), continuing in a subtler guise the very mechanisms of
oppression it sought to resist. Humanism is the nineteenth
century motif, and individual autonomy and subjectivity its
concepts, that must be rejected if a politics adequate to our age
is to be articulated. This motif and its concepts are not peculiar to
anarchism; they provide the foundation both for liberalism, with its
emphasis on freedom and autonomy, and for traditional Marxism,
with its focus on labor as a species-being, as well. (It is no accident
that recent Marxists such as Althusser have tried to re-formulate
Marxism by divesting it of all humanist categories.) Humanism is
the foundation of all political theory bequeathed to us by the
nineteenth century. In rejecting it, post-structuralism has
questioned not only the fundamental assumptions of such theory,
but also the very idea that political theory actually requires foundations. That is why post-structuralism is so often misunderstood
as an extreme relativism or nihilism.
However, it is not in favor of chaos that post-structuralism has
abjured the notion of foundations, humanist or otherwise, for its
political theorizing. What it has offered instead are precise
analyses of oppression in its operation on a variety of registers.
None of the post-structuralists claims to offer unsurpassable
perspectives on oppression; indeed their analyses raise doubts
about the coherence of the concept of an unsurpassable
perspective in political theory. Instead, they engage in what has
often been called “micropolitics”: political theorizing that is
specific to regions, types, or levels of political activity, but makes
no pretensions of offering a general political theory. To offer a
general political theory would in fact run counter to their common
contention that oppression must be analyzed and resisted on the
many registers and in the many nexes in which it is discovered.
It would be to invite a return to the problem created by humanism,
which became a tool of oppression to the very degree that it
became a conceptual foundation for political or social thought.
For the post-structuralists, there is a Stalin waiting behind every
general political theory: either you conform to the concepts on
which it relies, or else you must be changed or eliminated in favor
of those concepts. Foundationalism in political theory is, in short,
inseparable from representation.
This is the trap of an anarchist humanism. By relying on
humanism as its conceptual basis, anarchists precluded the
possibility of resistance by those who do not conform to its
dictates of normal subjectivity. Thus it is no surprise when in
Kropotkin’s critique of the prisons he lauds Pinel as a liberator of
the insane, failing to see the new psychological bonds Pinel
introduced and which Foucault analysed in *Histoire de la Folie.*[33]
For traditional anarchism, abnormality is to be cured
rather than expressed; and though far more tolerant of deviance
from the norm in matters of sexuality and other behaviors, there
remains in such an anarchism the concept of the norm as the
prototype of the properly human. This prototype, the post-strucuralists
have argued, does not constitute the source of
resistance against oppression in the contemporary age; rather,
through its unity and its concrete operation it is one form of such
oppression.
Traditional anarchism, in its foundational concepts — and
moreover, in the fact of possessing foundational concepts —
betrays the insights which constitute its core. Humanism is a form
of representation; thus, anarchism, as a critique of
representation, cannot be constructed on its basis. Post-structuralist
theorizing has, in effect, offered a way out of the
humanist trap by engaging in non-foundationalist political
critique. Such critique reveals how decentralized,
non-representative radical theorizing can be articulated without
relying upon a fundamental concept or motif in the name of which
it offers its critique. However, one question remains which,
unanswered, threatens the very notion of post-structuralism as a
political *critique*. If it is not in the name of humanism or some
other foundation that the critique occurs, in what or whose name
is it a critique? How can the post-structuralists criticize existing
social structures as oppressive without either a concept of what
is being oppressed or at least a set of values that would be better
realized in another social arrangement? In eliminating autonomy
as inadequate to play the role of the oppressed in political critique,
has post-structuralism eliminated the role itself, and with it the
very possibility of critique? In short, can there be critique without
representation?
To the last question, the answer must be: in some sense yes, and
in some sense no. There can be no political critique without a
value in the name of which one criticizes. One practice or
institution must be said in some way to be wrong relative to
another. Simply put, evaluation cannot occur without values; and
where there are values, there is representation. For instance, in
his history of the prisons, Foucault criticizes the practices of
psychology and penology for normalizing individuals. His
criticism rests on a value that goes something like this: one should
not constrain others’ action or thought unnecessarily. Lyotard can
be read as promoting the value, among others, of allowing the
fullest expression for different linguistic genres. Inasmuch as
these values are held to be valid for all, there is representation
underlying post-structuralist theorizing.
However, these values are not pernicious to the anarchist project
of allowing oppressed populations to decide their goals and their
means of resistance within the registers of their own oppression.
They do not reduce struggles in one area to struggles in another.
They are consonant with decentralized resistance and with local
self-determination. The values that infuse the works of Foucault,
Deleuze, and Lyotard are directed not toward formulating the
means and ends of the oppressed considered as a single class;
they try to facilitate the struggles of different groups by offering
analyses, conceptual strategies, and political and theoretical
critique. Foucault observes that “[t]he intellectual no longer has to
play the role of an advisor. The project, tactics and goals to be
adopted are a matter for those who do the fighting. What the
intellectual can do is to provide instruments of analysis.” [34]
Post-structuralism leaves the decision of how the oppressed are to
determine themselves to the oppressed; it merely provides them
with intellectual tools that they may find helpful along the way.
And to those who say that even the minimal values of the
post-structuralists are too much, who refuse to be represented as
people who think others should not be constrained unnecessarily,
or would like to allow others their expression, the
post-structuralists have nothing to offer in the way of refutation. To
seek a general theory (outside any logical conflict or inconsistency between specific values) within which to place such
values is to engage once again in the project of building
foundations, and thus of representation. Beyond the point of local
values that allow for resistance along a variety of registers, there
is no longer theory — only combat.[35]
Thus post-structuralist theory is indeed anarchist. It is in fact more
consistently anarchist than traditional anarchist theory has
proven to be. The theoretical wellspring of anarchism — the
refusal of representation by political or conceptual means in order
to achieve self-determination along a variety of registers and at
different local levels — finds its underpinnings articulated most
accurately by the post-structuralist political theorists. Conversely,
post-structuralism, rather than comprising a jumble of unrelated
analyses, can be seen within the broad movement of anarchism.
Reiner Schurmann was correct to call the locus of resistance in
Foucault an “anarchist subject” who struggles against “the law of
social totalization.”[36] The same could be said for Deleuze and
Lyotard. The type of intellectual activity promoted by the
traditional anarchists and exemplified by the post-structuralists is
one of specific analysis rather than of overarching critique. The
traditional anarchists pointed to the dangers of the dominance of
abstraction; the post-structuralists have taken account of those
dangers in all of their works. They have produced a theoretical
corpus that addresses itself to an age that has seen too much of
political representation and too little of self-determination. What
both traditional anarchism and contemporary post-structuralism
seek is a society — or better, a set of intersecting societies — in
which people are not told who they are, what they want, and how
they shall live, but who will be able to determine these things for
themselves. These societies constitute an ideal and, as the
post-structuralists recognize, probably an impossible ideal. But in the
kinds of analyses and struggles such an ideal promotes —
analyses and struggles dedicated to opening up concrete spaces
of freedom in the social field — lay the value of anarchist theory,
both traditional and contemporary.
Indiana University of Pennsylvania
[1] Foucault, Michel. “Structuralism and Post-structuralism: An
Interview with Michel Foucault,” (conducted by Gerard Raulet), *Telos*
55, Spring 1983, p. 206.
[2] Ward, Colin. *Anarchy in Action* (London, Allen and Unwin: 1973),
p. 138.
[3] Cf. ex., Peter Dews, *Logics of Disintegration* (London, Verso:
1987) and Jürgen Habermas, *The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity* (Cambridge, MIT Press: 1987; translated by Frederick
Lawrence) on normative relativism and J.G. Merquior, *Foucault*
(Berkeley, University of California Press:1985) on nihilism. For accounts
of the Habermas-Lyotard debate for which this is a core issue, see David
Ingram, “Legitimacy and the Post-Modern Condition: The Political
Thought of Jean-Francois Lyotard” in *Praxis International*, Vol. 7,
#3–4, Winter 1987–88, pp. 286–305 and Stephen Watson, “Jurgen
Habermas and Jean-Francois Lyotard: Post Modernism and the Crisis of
Rationality” in *Philosophy and Social Criticism*, Vol. 10#2, 1984, pp.
1–24.
[4] Of course, one need not proceed in this order. However,
contemporary political philosophy — both Anglo-American and
Continental — has been guided by the predominance of these three
intertwined elements, with Rawls and Habermas providing perhaps the
most enlightened examples.
[5] For an overview of the history of this conflict, see James Joll’s
*The Anarchists* (Boston, Little, Brown and Co.: 1965), pp. 79–96.
[6] Bakunin, Mikhail, *Selected Writings*, (London, Cape: 1973, ed.
Arthur Lehning, tr. Steven Cox and Olive Stevens), p. 253.
[7] It can be argued that, since all administration involves
decision-making, even administrative representation requires a transfer of power;
thus the change from administrative to political representation is a matter
of degree rather than one of kind. This is true; but it is only another way
of saying that politics is not science. To delegate a minimal amount of
decision-making power to an administrative body is not to surrender the
fundamental decisions of one’s public life. To put the matter otherwise,
anarchist decision-making may be a relative rather than an absolute
goal, but as a goal it is distinct from either liberal democracy or the
dictatorship of the proletariat.
[8] Cf. *God and the State* (New York, Dover: 1970).
[9] For a contemporary account of some of the fronts of anarchist
struggle, see *Reinventing Anarchy: What are Anarchists Thinking These Days?*, ed. Howard Ehrlich, Carol Ehrlich, David DeLeon and
Glenda Morris (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul: 1979).
[10] Kropotkin, Peter, “Anarchist Communism” in *Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets*, ed. Roger Baldwin (New York, Dover: 1970), p. 51.
[11] Ward, Colin, *Anarchy in Action*, op. cit., p. 52.
[12] Kropotkin, Peter, “Anarchist Morality” in *Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets*, op. cit., p. 105.
[13] Walter, Nicolas, “About Anarchism,” in *Reinventing Anarchy*, op. cit., p. 43.
[14] Represented by such figures as Max Stirner and Benjamin Tucker.
[15] Kropotkin’s *Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution* (London,
Heinemann: 1902) is a reply to Darwin’s thesis of natural selection,
arguing that there is among all animals a cooperative spirit dedicated to
furthering the race that exists alongside the competitive spirit. “Sociability
and need of mutual aid and support are such inherent parts of human
nature that at no time of history can we discover men living in small
isolated families, fighting each other for the means of subsistence” p.
118.
[16] Bookchin, Murray, *Remaking Society* (Montreal and New York,
Black Rose Books: 1989), p.174.
[17] Bakunin, *God and the State*, op. cit., p. 31.
[18] “Intellectuals and Power,” in Michel Foucault, *Language, Counter-Memory, Practice*, -tr. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon
(Ithaca, Cornell University Press: 1077), p. 209.
[19] “Truth, Power, Self: An Interview,” in *Technologies of the Self*, ed.
Luther Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick Hutton (Amherst, University of
Massachusetts Press: 1988), p. 11. See Foucault’s “Afterword” in
Dreyfus and Rabinow’s Michel Foucault: *Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics* (Chicago, University of Chicago Press: 1982): “My objective...has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects” p. 208.
[20] “Energumen Capitalism,” tr. James Leigh, in *Semiotext(e)*, “Anti-
Oedipus,” Vol. 2, #3, 1977, p. 17.
[21] Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, *Anti-Oedipus* (New York,
Viking: 1977), p. 29.
[22] Deleuze, Gilles and Parnet, Claire, *Dialogues* (New York,
Columbia: 1987, tr. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam), p. 133.
[23] Cf. ex., Richard Rorty’s *Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature*
(Princeton, Princeton University Press: 1979), the most seminal of the
works emphasizing the importance of the social in epistemology.
[24] Cf. ex., Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor, *Dialectic of Enlightenment* (New York, Seabury Press: 1972, tr. John Cumming).
[25] *Discipline and Punish* (New York, Random House: 1977, tr. Alan
Sheridan), p. 23.
[26] *History of Sexuality: Volume 1, An Introduction*
(New York, Random House: 1980, tr. Robert Hurley), p. 57.
[27] Though we only address *Capitalism and Schizophrenia* here,
Deleuze’s concern with energics goes back as far as his second book,
*Nietzsche and Philosophy* (New York, Columbia University Press:
1983), where he follows Nietzsche’s analysis of subjectivity in its
constitution by active and reactive forces.
[28] *Anti-Oedipus*, op. cit., p. 104.
[29] Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, *A Thousand Plateaus*
(Minneapolis, University of
Minnesota Press: 1987, tr. Brian
Massumi),
p. 3 *et passim.*
[30] Cf., *Economie Libidinale* (Paris, Editions de Minuit:1974), esp. pp.
9–26 for a full account of Lyotard’s energics and “Energumen
Capitalism,” op. cit., pp. 21–26 for his critique of Deleuze and Guattari’s
handling of Oedipus.
[31] Lyotard, Jean-Francois and Thebaud, Jean-Loup, *Just Gaming*
(Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press: 1985, tr. Wlad Godzich), p.
26.
[32] *The Differend* (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press: 1988,
tr. George Van Den Abbeele), p. 9.
[33] Cf. Kropotkin’s “Prisons and Their Moral Influence on Prisoners” in
*Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets*, op. cit., esp. p. 234; and
Foucault’s *Histoire de la Folie a L’age Classique* (Paris, Gallimard:
1972), pp. 511–530.
[34] *Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977* (New York, Pantheon: 1980, tr. C. Gordon, L. Marshall, J.
Mepham, and K. Soper), p. 62.
[35] It should be noted that it is not only politically unappealing but
theoretically impossible as well to seek to found a set of values in order
to refute a value held by another. Hitler’s central value — roughly that
Jews were the cause of all European trouble and must be eliminated —
could not be refuted if he could make all of his other values logically
consistent with it, which is certainly possible in principle.
[36] “On Constituting Oneself an Anarchist Subject” in *Praxis International*, Vol. 6, #13, 1986, p. 307.